My wife and I have decided to try something new in the seemingly never ending attempt to get the Little Lagomorph (age 3 years and 4 mos) once and truly potty trained.
A few days ago she went to Target and bought up several hundred dollars worth of Thomas the Tank engine trains, books, etc. We now have a deal with him: use the potty, get a train.
He is our first and only. He was actually doing well months ago, but since then he has just seemed to lose interest. It is almost as if he has figured out “Hey, I don’t have to use the potty. Mom and Dad will just change my pull-ups when they are wet”. He wears “big kid” underwear every day, too, but he doesn’t seem to care when he wets them. He will just keep playing, or whatever, with wet pants. He is also very strong willed, and I think he resents being told what to do. In that respect he is a normal three year old.
It really isn’t a big deal…we don’t threaten or yell (maybe we should). But we would like him doing this by September…his new preschool more or less insists the kids be potty trained. I am just afraid the bribery will backfire when we inevitably cut him off from gifts.
FTR, the bribery program has been a smashing success so far…he grasped the concept instantly. He still wets his pants, though, THEN goes to the potty and pees in it a little bit, and demands a train. My wife said we should take back a train every time he has an accident, but we haven’t done this. Yet.
My daughter is intensely interested in the whole potty concept … she’s just not ready to do any of it naked. It is quite hysterical when she wipes her clothed bum with toilet paper and flushes the invisible flush on the wall near her potty. She just turned two so we aren’t at the point of training yet.
Everything I’ve been reading though suggests a rewards system (read: bribery) although with something a bit smaller than trains. But they also all say that nothing will get a kid to train who is not ready. I am encouraged that this will happen eventually though since I know no adult who is not potty trained
I do like your wife’s idea of taking the trains away for each accident. One of the bribery methods I was looking at was a sticker chart where x stickers resulted in a treasure. Stickers were earned with success and lost with accidents.
I am looking forward to the responses to the thread from successful parents and would love to follow your son’s progress Amazing what interests you once you become a parent!!! Good luck in this too
I figure I’m going to either get really lucky in 6 months and when the new baby is born my daughter will have an a-ha diapers are for babies moment and train quickly (not likely) or she will have just started training and the new baby will make her regress and there will be no potty training for quite some time! (just my luck
Thinking back on my many years, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are far too many opportunities squandered and lost by the need to visit the toilet. Had I only soiled myself rather than getting up and leaving the room, it is entirely possible I would be a happier and wealthier man.
I shed a tear for the poor child who will be forced into bourgeois conformity. In this day and age, no less.
I’d write more, but I gotta visit the loo. Damn it. My foe. My nemesis. That porcelain temptress … seductress … so smooth, so firm … no! I must stay strong. I must resist. But the swirl of the water …
Thomas the Tank Engine, and James the … whatever (it’s been a few years) are the only reason my now 11-year-old cousin ever learned to poop in the potty.
I wasn’t aware that there were men out there who didn’t want to sit onthe toilet with a good book until their legs fell asleep. Hmmm.
I wish I had bribery. No carrots for me, just the stick. Not a real stick. You see when I grew up we had cloth diapers. I was the last generation to use them in my family. They were great motivators to learn to use the potty. And boy did they work great on me. Or so my mom says.
LL, apparently Lil Kate (ours) is a much cheaper sell than yours. We started introducing her to the potty about 6 months ago or so. No pressure, just the introduction.
And then, when she’d been able to get the concept down (piddling reliably but not pooping) we offered…
Stickers
Little happy face stickers in several colors.
Worked like a charm.
And I, too, agree with the ‘taking trains away’ thing. He knows what he’s to do…he just doesn’t do it. There’s no more ‘training’ there…it’s just needing to instill the desire to listen to it when the call comes.
Actually, we have been looking everywhere for Thomas the Tank Engine stickers, so far without success. If anyone knows where we could get some online it would be greatly appreciated.
I was originally opposed to the taking away a train for each accident part of the strategy but the more I think about the more I like it. He can live without one of his trains for a day or two…Lord knows he has enough of them. Jonathan is right…he knows what he is supposed to be doing, he just isn’t inclined to do it.
Also, it will help to preserve the supply of trains :rolleyes: .
My daughter is nearly four and is of lno’s school of thought. She knows what to do and when to do it, but doesn’t. Stickers didn’t work. Peeing for prizes didn’t work. Peer pressure doesn’t work. She is now back in diapers and is going to start having things taken away. Tomorrow her nearly five year old brother and I are going out, and she will have to stay home because she is still a “baby.” And we are going to start doing that until she learns that its better to not pee and poop in your pants.
We tried the bribery with Turbo Puppy when he was 3, we used a Buzz Lightyear though. It was going pretty well, he got to play with Buzz for 15 minutes or so when he was a “big kid”. Then a day with Grandma taking away things for accidents set him back and awoke a streak of stubborness we didn’t know resided in the child. He insisted he wore diapers. A couple of years(!) and many, many attempts later, I got fed up and told him if he was so insistant on wearing diapers he’d better put them on himself. The next day, he decided using the potty was easier than diapering himself.
Maybe the stubborn kids just need a different motivation.
Ugh Tequila… grandparents seem to forget that the darling grandchildren have parents who have rules and things! I try and explain to ours all the time that while I expect a certain amount of spoiling on their part there are some things I expect them to respect my decisions about!
You should see the chaos at restaurants when they all try and help her eat!!! I’ve had my last meal out with these people since the IHOP incident!
Ok end of grandparent hijack rant… back to the regularly scheduled potty talk!
A friend of mine trained her little boy by making it a game. She would throw a couple of cheerios in the toilet and tell him to aim. He loved it and it worked. Just an FYI.
Well, my kids were of the “I ain’t gonna till I’m gonna” school; they were both past age 4 when they trained, even though they’d known perfectly well for ages what they needed to do.
But to further cheer you all up, a former employer has a daughter who, last I heard at age 8, still REFUSED to use a toilet. They’ve tried everything. Medical exams. Psychiatric exams. Rewards. Punishments. She puts her own diapers on and seems quite content. Weird.
My son is 3 years 1 month (and an only child as well) and we just got him trained about 3 weeks ago. We use popsicles or just about any convenient thing about to happen as reward (going to the park, watching a favorite TV show, etc). We are getting to the point where it is general rewards and not every time he goes rewards. The general, “you have had a good day, you can have ice cream for dessert because you are a good, big boy type” attitude.
My son’s biggest demand these days is “play with me”. I found what works best is telling him I will not play with babies. If he has a deliberate accident (Not one justified - his reaction shows the difference. When he didn’t do it on purpose he feels guilty enough on his own and I don’t need to punish him), I won’t play with him and pretty well respond to any request with, “sorry, not for babies”. This has worked well. He has been asking not to wear a diaper to bed lately, but we are not ready for that.
My son goes to “School” two days a week, and when he moved from the 2 year old room to the 3 year old room and was one of the only ones in diapers out of 16 kids, that seemed to help a lot, too. He has favorite friends and saying things like “Now you are just like Brett and Ian! You wear big boy underpants just like them!” That seems to help, too.
I still can’t help carrying a diaper bag around with me… old habits die hard.
My son still sits. Some people have more luck with standing at this age. Whichever one you have been trying, maybe try the other one. The cheerios as targets does seem to be pretty successful with some. My son, on the other hand, was appalled to see some of his favorite food thrown carelessly into the toilet. They do make targets out of toilet safe colorful tissue you can buy. Here is an example:targets
There’s an old saying related to potty-training, something to the effect that your kids will not be in diapers at their high-school graduation. In other words, don’t sweat it.
We pushed son #1 to potty-train before age 2.
We let son #2 do it when he wanted to (a little past 3 yrs old) - partly because we were tired, but mainly because he’s stubborn and can be quite mean if he doesn’t get his way.
End result? Son #1 still has problems at night, at age 7. Son #2 learned potty-training in one week - he’s now 5 and has never had an accident, ever.
I’d just let her master it when she’s ready. Several hundred dollars worth of toys?! Thomas the Tank Engine makers must love y’all!!
There are quite a few in that lot and the auction doesn’t end for another couple of days. To find them, I simply typed thomas the tank engine stickers* into their search engine with the asterick on the end (and no capitals or quotation marks) to make sure it covered a variety of spellings. I think it pulled up about 50 hits. Hope that helps.
I confess to indulging in a little bit of hyperbole. I believe she said the bill came to $150 that day, although that might have included unrelated items purchased at Target that day. The grandparents have pitched in too. In any case, I DO expect a nice Christmas card from the Thomas people. We have dropped a nice chunk o’ change on their wares.
I did a sticker chart for my two youngest. They would get a sticker for everytime they peed in the potty, and a sticker and a piece of candy everytime they pooped. When they filled the paper with stickers, that meant they knew what they were doing, and their reward would be a new bike.
My middle child filled her paper in three days and got her bike as promised. She was about three.
My youngest filled her paper in about a week or so, and got her bike as well. She had just turned four.
I didn’t feel bad at all for offering a bribe.
When they didn’t make it to the potty, I didn’t make a big deal out of it; they just didn’t get a sticker. It helped them try harder next time. There were a few accidents here and there after they were trained, but I never acted like it was any big deal.
